Motivating girls to do science...

[Coscolluela Eileene]

Karen Allendoerfer (ravena at cco.caltech.edu) wrote:
: I hope this suggestion doesn't offend anyone, but where I have seen
: attitudes like this coming from most often in this day and age, where
: institutional discrimination is less common than in the past, is the
: family.  Many families still have different expectations for their
: daughters vs. their sons:  the sons will go out into the world and make a
: name for themselves, the daughters will get married and have
: grandchildren.  

	I completely agree.  I don't think it's the schools that aren't
	encouraging us to go into science (my school didn't discourage
	me or any of my friends from entering science-related fields).  It
	was primarily our parents that did this.  My best friend's parents
	were very traditional Chinese and their attitude towards her 
	(a very bright engineering student).  They refused to allow her
	to go to a school where she got accepted and gave her full tuition
	because she's "a female" and they expected her to "go to a state
	school only" because they were saving their money up for her
	younger brother who isn't as intelligent or have the same potential as
	she has.  That almost devastated her career in the sciences...

	Luckily she had an uncle who saw otherwise and supplied her with
	the funds to attend college.


	Eileene Coscolluela	       |"All our science, measured against 
       University of Illinois	       | reality, is primitive and childlike --
     ecoscoll at students.uiuc.edu        | and yet it is the most precious thing
http://www.students.uiuc.edu/~ecoscoll/| we have."  --Albert Einstein